Writing Details
Recognition Any contributions to a specific MUIS will earn you (or your website/company/username) a recognition credit on that MUIS. There are three tiers of credits. The quantity and quantity of your contributions will decide your tier! Author Credit--for top contributors. Your name will appear in full glory on the cover of the specific MUIS you work on! Major Contributor Credit--for high-level contributors. You will receive recognition before the MUIS launches. Contributor Credit--for our awesome general contributors! You will receive recognition in the app credits. Ownership By the time a project is complete and gets to the point where it will begin to generate revenue, all top contributors will have own a specific amount of equity in that story. The profits it generates will be distributed to those contributors for the life of the project! Target Audience For our first few stories, I think we should target ages 8-11 (grades 3-5). I want the content of the stories to be very fun and "family friendly" while being entertaining for all ages. We will eventually branch out and target other ages, but for our first phase (6 months to a year), I want to focus on increasing reading comprehension and improving literacy. Writing Guide Each character needs to have at least one "Turning Point" which is our unique mechanism. The "Turning Point" is when one user's choice overrides the other user's decision if their character is in a certain location. Only one User has a "Turning Point" during any one chapter. So, for example, if User A has their Turning Point during Chapter 4, user B has theirs during Chapter 5, and User C has theirs during Chapter 6. As long as there are enough chapters for each user to have their own "turning point", the number of chapters is up to you. The story needs to feel very open ended and playing the story again should be a totally different experience, but the constant branching out of giving the user choices after each chapter can increase the amount of writing required too much. The exact word count per chapter is flexible (although I was thinking like 800-1,200 words) as long as we try to avoid making any decisions for the user. In Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, the user control's the character's decisions and feels a connection to the story because they get to call the shots. Then when the character takes an action in the middle of a chapter instead of at a decision point, the user gets disconnected from the story because they would not have chosen to take that action. At this point in MyMUIS development, there need to be 3 playable characters per MUIS. These characters each need to have totally unique perspective. I think that reading from each character's perspective should be completely different. These characters can be closely bound to each other, or they could have the option to completely avoid one another, located in different parts of the world. That's totally up to our contributors! With this structure, the storyline must always progress--meaning the adventurers can't ever return to the same part of the tunnel like they would be able to in single player interactive fiction. That would make for an exciting adventure and the user would never feel like they were too comfortable in the tunnels. They wouldn't get the chance to learn the tunnel system until they start the story over a few times! The system is rigid in certain ways, but flexible in others. After each chapter, each user should be given three options for the decision they want their character to make. There needs to be one predetermined Chapter 1 for each character. After Chapter 1, each character will be given 3 choices, and each of these should go to a unique Chapter 2. That means each character needs 3 different versions of Chapter 2. I know this form sounds a bit intense and massive, but it is a lot of fun to write and allows you a ton of freedom as a creator. When writing the stories, you could use overlapping chapters, as in multiple ways for Character A to reach the airplane after Chapter 4, but every time he gets there, the same Chapter 5 appears. This will enormously save the number of chapters you need to write. Basic structure: 6 Chapters with 3 Choices after each. One character needs 1 Chapter 1 3 Chapter 2's Between 6 and 9 Chapter 3's Between 12 and 20 Chapter 4's Between 20 and 40 Chapter 5's Between 36 and 80 Chapter 6's That's a total chapter count between 78 and 153 for 6 chapters for one character! That's a lot of content to create! I'd recommend staying as close to those suggested minimums as possible. I think that most users will not replay the same story from the same character's perspective 36 times, so the majority of our audience will not get close to finding the "outer walls" of the story. I think it is important to really focus on creating a world that users can see and imagine, and really feel like they are a part of it.